Slowly, with agonizing slowness, the moments crept by; slowly we continued sinking, down, down, down, ever down and down, with movement gradual and constantly diminishing, yet never ceasing. Never before in history, we told ourselves, had living men been plunged so far beneath the ocean. Our instruments recorded first twelve hundred feet, then fourteen, then sixteen, then eighteen hundred feet below sea level! And as we sank downward, we became aware that we were not the only living creatures in these depths. Our searchlights made us the center of attraction for myriads of scaly things; whole schools and squadrons of fishes were gathering moth-like in the vivid illumination thrown out by our vessel. Some were long, snaky monsters, with thin heads set with rows of spike-like teeth, and tiny eyes that gleamed evilly in the uncanny light; some were lithe sea dragons, with wolfish mouths and sabre-like bony appendages projecting from low foreheads; some were many-colored, rainbow-hued or streaked with black and golden, or red and azure, or yellow and white; some had chameleon eyes that flashed first green and then blue, according to the play of the light about them; many were flitting to and fro, circling and spiralling and doubling back and forth at incredible speed; and not a few, unacquainted with the ways of submarines, collided full-tilt with the thick glass of our portholes. But as our depth gradually increased, our finny visitors began to give way to others stranger still. When we were twenty-two hundred feet below the surface, the searchlights were no longer necessary to reveal the denizens of the deep, for the inhabitants of those unthinkable regions carried their own lamps! And how they amazed us and startled us!--how, in our shuddering nerve-racking terror, they appeared to us as ghosts or avenging fiends, or struck our overworked imaginations as approaching foes or rescuers! Suddenly, out of the deathly blackness, a spurt of green light appeared, swiftly widening until it seemed an unearthly searchlight--and, from a narrow focus of flame, two huge burning green eyes would shoot forth, darting cold malice at us through the glass port, until the yellow electric light would seem tinged with an emerald reflection. Or else a tiny flattened disk, softly phosphorescent throughout and marked on one surface by two bright beady eyes, would come floating in our direction like a pale apparition; or, again, a long dark rod, brilliantly white like a living flashlight, would dart curving and gleaming toward us out of the remote gloomy depths. But more terrifying than any of these were the nameless monsters with invisible bodies and lidless, fiery yellow eyes of the size of baseballs,--eyes that stared in at us, and stared and stared, as though all the concentrated horror of the universe were glaring upon us, seeking to ferret us out and mark us for its victims.